The real facts were, as we know, far less brilliant and less extravagant than those supplied by popular imagination. It would be a mistake, however, to neglect or despise them on account of their tedious monotony and the insignificance of the characters who appear on the stage. It was by dint of fighting her neighbours again and again, without a single day’s respite, that Rome succeeded in forging the weapons with which she was to conquer the world; and any one who, repelled by their tedious sameness, neglected to follow the history of her early struggles, would find great difficulty in understanding how it came about that a city which had taken centuries to subjugate her immediate neighbours should afterwards overcome all the states on the Mediterranean seaboard with such magnificent ease. In much the same way the ceaseless struggles of Assyria with the Chaldaeans, and with the mountain tribes of the Zagros Chain, were unconsciously preparing her for those lightning-like campaigns in which she afterwards overthrew all the civilized nations of the Bast one after another. It was only at the cost of unparalleled exertions that she succeeded in solidly welding together the various provinces within her borders, and in kneading (so to speak) the many and diverse elements of her vast population into one compact mass, containing in itself all that was needful for its support, and able to bear the strain of war for several years at time without giving way, and rich enough in men and horses to provide the material for an effective army without excessive impoverishment of her trade or agriculture.
Drawn by Boudier, from a painted bas-relief given in Layard.
The race came of an old Semitic strain, somewhat crude as yet, and almost entirely free from that repeated admixture of foreign elements which had marred the purity of the Babylonian stock. The monuments show us a type similar in many respects to that which we find to-day on the slopes of Singar, or in the valleys to the east of Mossul.
The figures on the monuments are tall and straight, broad-shouldered and wide in the hips, the arms well developed, the legs robust, with good substantial feet. The swell of the muscles on the naked limbs is perhaps exaggerated, but this very exaggeration of the modelling suggests the vigour of the model; it is a heavier, more rustic type than the Egyptian, promising greater strength and power of resistance, and in so far an indisputable superiority in the great game of war. The head is somewhat small, the forehead low and flat, the eyebrows heavy, the eye of a bold almond shape, with heavy lids, the nose aquiline, and full at the tip, with wide nostrils terminating in a hard, well-defined curve; the lips are thick and full, the chin bony, while the face is framed by the coarse dark wavy hair and beard, which fell in curly masses over the nape of the neck and the breast. The expression of the face is rarely of an amiable and smiling type, such as we find in the statues of the Theban period or in those of the Memphite empire, nor, as a matter of fact, did the Assyrian pride himself on the gentleness of his manners: he did not overflow with love for his fellow-man, as the Egyptian made a pretence of doing; on the contrary, he was stiff-necked and proud, without pity for others or for himself, hot-tempered and quarrelsome like his cousins of Chaldæa, but less turbulent and more capable of strict discipline. It mattered not whether he had come into the world in one of the wretched cabins of a fellah village, or in the palace of one of the great nobles; he was a born soldier, and his whole education tended to develop in him the first qualities of the soldier—temperance, patience, energy, and unquestioning obedience: he was enrolled in an army which was always on a war footing, commanded by the god Assur, and under Assur, by the king, the vicegerent and representative of the god. His life was shut in by the same network of legal restrictions which confined that of the Babylonians, and all its more important events had to be recorded on tablets of clay; the wording of contracts, the formalities of marriage or adoption, the status of bond and free, the rites of the dead and funeral ceremonies, had either remained identical with those in use during the earliest years of the cities of the Lower Euphrates, or differed from them only in their less important details. The royal and municipal governments levied the same taxes, used the same procedure, employed the same magistrates, and the grades of their hierarchy were the same, with one exception. After the king, the highest office was filled by a soldier, the tartan who saw to the recruiting of the troops, and led them in time of war, or took command of the staff-corps whenever the sovereign himself deigned to appear on the scene of action.*
* We can determine the rank occupied, by the tartanu at
court by the positions they occupy in the lists of eponymous
limmu: they invariably come next after the king—a fact
which was noticed many years ago.
The more influential of these functionaries bore, in addition to their other titles, one of a special nature, which, for the space of one year, made its holder the most conspicuous man in the country; they became limmu, and throughout their term of office their names appeared on all official documents. The Chaldæans distinguished the various years of each reign by a reference to some event which had taken place in each; the Assyrians named them after the limmu.* The king was the ex-officio limmu for the year following that of his accession, then after him the tartan, then the ministers and governors of provinces and cities in an order which varied little from reign to reign. The names of the limmu, entered in registers and tabulated—just as, later on, were those of the Greek archons and Roman consuls—furnished the annalists with a rigid chronological system, under which the facts of history might be arranged with certainty.**
* According to Delitzsch, the term limu, or limmu, meant
at first any given period, then later more especially the
year during which a magistrate filled his office; in the
opinion of most other Assyriologists it referred to the
magistrate himself as eponymous archon.
** The first list of limmu was discovered by H. Rawlinson.
The portions which have been preserved extend from the year
893 to the year 666 B.C. without a break. In the periods
previous and subsequent to this we have only names scattered
here and there which it has not been possible to classify:
the earliest limmu known at present flourished under
Rammân-nirâri I., and was named Mukhurilâni. Three different
versions of the canon have como down to us. In the most
important one the names of the eponymous officials are
written one after another without titles or any mention of
important events; in the other two, the titles of each
personage, and any important occurrences which took place
during his year of office, are entered after the name.
The king still retained the sacerdotal attributes with which Cossæan monarchs had been invested from the earliest times, but contact with the Egyptians had modified the popular conception of his personality. His subjects were no longer satisfied to regard him merely as a man superior to his fellow-men; they had come to discover something of the divine nature in him, and sometimes identified him—not with Assur, the master of all things, who occupied a position too high above the pale of ordinary humanity—but with one of the demi-gods of the second rank, Shamash, the Sun, the deity whom the Pharaohs pretended to represent in flesh and blood here below. His courtiers, therefore, went as far as to call him “Sun” when they addressed him, and he himself adopted this title in his inscriptions.*